Events
Here is a list of the various workshops and seminars organized by the WAIT group.
Main content
2020
Final conference: Waiting for uncertain futures: Time and migration
As the WAIT project at the Centre for Women's and Gender Research (SKOK) was in its final year, we marked the end of the project with a digital closing conference in October 2020.
2019
"The politics and aesthetic of waiting in Palestinian refugee camps"
Ruba Salih from Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, gave a talk about temporality in Palestinian refugee camps.
In the social sciences, the time and space of refugeehood is conventionally conceived as one of temporariness and waithood. Refugee camps are often analysed through the prism of exception or suspension of sovereignty, and forced migrants or refugees are mainly seen as affective communities of trauma and suffering. In addition, the (European) national-statist time space/horizon continues to be the bedrock against which experiences and subjectivities of those on the move are read and interpreted.
The refugee camp, in this political imaginary, is an abnormality, a barren place-time in which refugees are suspended, or trapped, merely waiting for their re-insertion into a national order of things. Refugee life聽acquires the ontological quality of Non-Life, of waiting for sovereign life. In this paper, I investigate what happens when waiting is a permanent horizon of life across generations, like in the case of encamped Palestinian refugees who have been displaced since 1948.
In my work on and with Palestinian refugees, particularly in the occupied West Bank, I explore waithood as a politically productive condition, and the refugee camp as the most potent embodiment of this condition. An ethnography of the politics and聽aesthetic聽of the camp reveals ways in which聽temporariness聽is a powerful antidote to normalisation under the聽longue dur茅e聽of the occupation.
Comments by , Post doctor at CMI. She is working on the FRIPRO project "SuperCamp: Geneaologies of humanitarian containment in the Middle East". In this project she is focusing on Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and the Shu'fat refugee camp in Jerusalem.
"Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides"
Collaboration between University of Berkley and SKOK financed by the Peder S忙ter grants. The two-day seminar consisted of doscussions evloving around toe constructions of refugees, immigrants, and indigenous peoples and how they are studied in relation to white 鈥渘atives,鈥� but seldom in relation to one another, and plans for future collaboration.聽
"Time and Temporalities"聽 workshop
This workshop was co-organized with the Department of Sociology, 幸运飞艇计划.聽The topic of the workshop invited聽a broad approach and participants were聽invited to engage in discussions with reference to the writings of one of the pioneers of contemporary social theorising on time, Professor emerita Barbara Adam,聽as well as to other authors and their own research.
"The Design Politics of the Passport" - open seminar
In this seminar, Mahmoud Keshavarz presented his聽recently published book, The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent. It is an interdisciplinary study of the passport and its associated social, political and material practices as a means of uncovering the workings of what he聽calls 鈥榙esign politics鈥�. It traces the histories, technologies, power relations and contestations around this small but powerful artefact to establish a framework for understanding how design is always enmeshed in the political, and how politics can be understood in terms of material objects.
Combining design studies with critical border studies, alongside ethnographic work among undocumented migrants, border transgressors and passport forgers, this book shows how a world made and designed as open and hospitable to some is strictly enclosed, confined and demarcated for many others - and how those affected by such injustices dissent from the immobilities imposed on them through the same capacity of design and artifice.
About Keshavarz: Mahmoud Keshavarz is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the聽Engaging Vulnerability聽Research Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University. He is the author of聽The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent聽(Bloomsbury),聽co-founder of聽Decolonizing Design group聽and co-editor-in-chief of聽Design and Culture Journal.
"The concept of waiting and its analytical potential in studying irregularized migration" - seminar
With visits from Ghassan Hage, Svati Shah and guest researcher Knut Graw, the WAIT group invited to a closed reading seminar to discuss the analytical potential in "waiting" as a concept.聽
"Migration, history and the question of voice"聽-聽Open Seminar with Knut Graw
Centre for Women's and Gender Research and researchers from Project WAIT invited all interested to an open seminar with guest researcher Knut Graw. Graw is a researcher in social anthropology at the University of Leuven.聽His theoretical interests reach from ritual analysis and migration theory to globalization studies.聽
Anonymity is one of the most salient features of migration today and in the past.聽Concentrating on an individual account of migration from before the highly mediatized boat arrivals of West African migrants in Europe, this talk attempts to understand some of the dynamics and motivations underlying the recent history of migration between West Africa and Europe.
By focusing on an individual narrative, the seminar aims at developing a perspective that may allow us to grasp the individual dimension of migration as well as the historical nature of the border regimes governing individual migration trajectories, addressing questions of both, history and voice. Connecting fields of bodily experience, subjectivity and politics alike, the question of voice emerges as an important site to think about the complex interplay of historical, subjective and gendered dimensions of migration and its underlying social realities.
"WAIT: Unpacking the temporalities of irregular migration" - Conference聽
Core researcher, network partners and affiliated researchers met at foot of Acropolis, at the Norwegian Institute in Athens (NIA), to discuss and reflect on the topics of the WAIT project.
"Waitinghood: Unpacking the temporalities of waiting and irregular migration" - Seminar
Seminar with Sarah Sharma and presentations from researchers from the WAIT and In Sync projects, organised at CAS, Centre for Advanced Studies i Oslo.
2018
"Life on Hold" - Public seminar and outreach听(狈翱)
"Life on Hold" was a public seminar hosted at Litteraturhuset in Bergen.聽
Researchers in the WAIT projects organized a workshop as a part of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference in Stockholm.
In the Nordic Migration Research conference, parts of the WAIT team organized a workshop for panel discussions.
V盲ntans proportioner: Ett seminarium om konst, forskning och migration
The seminar, in the seminar series Critical Border Studies at the University of Uppsala, was lead by social anthropologist and member of the WAIT-team, Sharam Khosravi, in collaboration with聽Paula Urbano og Annika Lindberg.
2017
"Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran" - new book from WAIT researcher
Shahram Khosravi from Stockholm University聽recently published his newest ethnographic book, Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, an "intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life," where he elegantly weaves together insights from his studies of Iranian youth culture and migration studies. In this seminar, the discussion revolved around the topics of his book.
"Arazel Owbash" - Polluted and Polluting Masculine Bodies as Anti-Citizens in Iran
Shahram Khosravi visited SKOK in May to give a talk about Iranian practices of governing through the criminalization of young men.
The policy of 鈥榞overning through crime鈥櫬爃as been operating during the past three decades in Iran.聽It creates criminals to be able to punish them. Redefining a social issue as crime, and categorizing an affected group as criminals, is a political strategy to legitimate further intervention into matters not previously regarded as criminal.聽鈥楪overn through crime鈥� makes crime and punishment the institutional context whereby a criminal population is constructed and excluded. One of the most recent category of 鈥榗riminals鈥� is聽arazel owbash聽(thugs and ruffians), who are generally聽聽young men from a low-income background.聽Many of them are immigrants or children of immigrants who has moved from rural areas to big cities.
The technologies of citizenship constitute a moralizing and 鈥榬esponsibilizing鈥� project, which aims to turn citizens into responsible and ethical subjects as opposed to irresponsible and unethical ones.聽In contrast to the ideal citizen, there is the anti-citizen,聽an individual who is believed to exist outside the ordinary regulatory system, one who violates established norms and who constitutes a risk to the wellbeing, virtue, values and norms of society. In this paper聽Khosravi will explain how representation of聽arazel owbash聽as anti-citizens is part of the technologies of citizenship.聽
"Imagining Emmanuel" -聽Screening of documentaries about irregular migration
SKOK and WAIT聽organized a public screening of "Imagining Emanuel" and "Out of Norway", followed by a conversation with the WAIT-researchers.聽
The curriculum for the new course about gender, migration and time禄 is directly linked with the聽WAIT research on migration in Europe, an angle that the students highly appreciate.
Times of Migration: Un/documented lives in Europe
Project leader Christine M. Jacobsen presented the WAIT project at IMER - Bergen International Migration and Ethnic Relations Research Unit's lunch seminar.
In this seminar Jacobsen presented the WAIT project as well as preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille. Based on this, she offered some initial theoretical reflections on waiting, hope and uncertainty.聽
IMER Bergen (International Migration and Ethnic Relations Research Unit Bergen), is a multidisciplinary research unit associated with the University of Bergen, 听补苍诲听.The aim of IMER Bergen is to contribute to research-based knowledge about international migration, including the consequences of immigration and emigration for societies
Times of Migration: Un/documented Lives in Marseille
Project leader Christine M. Jacobsen gave an open lecture at AMIS at University of Copenhagen about the WAIT-project's ethnographic field study in Marseille.
While migration has most often been studied as a spatial process, recent research points to 鈥榯ime鈥� as crucial to the production and experience of migration and migrant 鈥榠llegality鈥�. In this presentation Jacobsen takes ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Marseille as a point of departure for discussing some approaches to the temporalities of irregular migration. Particular attention will be paid to socially produced conditions of prolonged waiting, as well as the practices through which such conditions are encountered, incorporated and resisted by migrants. The presentation will draw on perspectives from the WAIT-project.
The Centre for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS) is an interdisciplinary forum for migration research. Combining a variety of approaches, including the social sciences, philosophy, history, ethnology, linguistics and the arts, the Centre promotes cutting-edge research on a broad range of issues in the theory and practice of migration.
WAIT - Das Warten auf eine unsichere Zukunf
Kari Anne K. Drangsland presented the WAIT project and her PhD work for the organization Das Begegnungshaus - Arbeitskreis Asyl in Walldorf, Baden-W眉rttemberg in Germany - March 2017.
Title: "Das Warten auf eine unsichere Zukunf: Die Zeit der Migration". Closed event.
Multiple Temporalities: epidemic, mobilizations, institutions and bodies
Sandrine Musso from Aix-Marseille University was one of the international network partners connected to the WAIT project, and gave the following presentation at this open semianr: 鈥淢ultiple temporalities: epidemic, mobilizations, institutions and bodies. Lessons of a research on postcolonial minorities and aids in France鈥�.
Sandrine Musso is Director of Department of Anthropology at University of Aix-Marseille and Senior Researcher at the Centre Norbert Elias, EHESS. Her research focuses on the political anthropology of health and AIDS, the phenomena of discrimination, social categorizations in the treatment of the disease, mediation in public health, the sociology of immigration, and commitment and reflexivity in the conduct of research. Her field practice mainly concerns members of stigmatized and presumed "hard-to-reach" groups.
Dignity on Hold聽 - Migration, Time, and Human Rights
Professor Odin Lysaker, Professor of Ethics ad the University of Agder and one of the researchers on the WAIT project, gave the presentation "Dignity On Hold - Migration, Time and Human Rights".
Today鈥檚 refugee crisis may put irregular migrants鈥� human dignity on hold due to their waiting. We should, therefore, reflect upon the relationship between time and temporality, on the one hand, and moral status in the case of transnational migration flows, on the other. The question is, then, how temporality preconditions dignity?
In this talk, and based on Hannah Arendt鈥檚 existential notion of 鈥榯he right to have rights鈥�, I present an alternative picture of human dignity. Here, this moral status is grounded in the human condition of 鈥榥atality鈥�, that is, temporality regarding such phenomena as birth, love, and freedom. Hence, I argue that dignity is put on hold as long as humans鈥� temporal precondition is misrecognized. By doing so, I shed light on so-called 鈥榤igrational temporalities鈥�, namely socially produced prolonged waiting, and how it is encountered, incorporated, and resisted by irregular migrants.
Researchers and network partners met for the first time in Paris聽to present, discuss and share thoughts about the research and to kickoff the WAIT project.